How To Select the Appropriate API Gateway for Your Platform

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CMARIX TechnoLabs
  • Date Published
  • Categories Blog
  • Reading Time 9-Minute Read

In this article, we’ll discuss how to choose a secure API gateway for your system.

Is new system development a goal of yours? If so, congrats to you! You’re about to start an amazing adventure full of highs and lows, where you’ll sometimes feel like a genius and at other times want to throw your laptop against the wall. Don’t fear, however; assistance is at hand. In this article, we’ll go over some guidelines to follow when selecting an Application Program Interface (API) gateway.

API gateways are crucial to the success of any system. They serve as the entry point to your platform’s many backend services. So, your website, mobile app, and wearable app may share the same API gateway. The ability to make adjustments to backend services without impacting frontend apps is a crucial feature. It simplifies the process of introducing new features or products by simply requiring the addition or modification of API endpoints. So, let’s not waste any more time and go right in.

What is an API Gateway?

An API gateway is a service that communicates with external applications. It handles tasks like authentication and API composition in addition to directing traffic. An API gateway acts like a façade in that it conceals underlying application architecture and exposes it to developers and users. An API gateway receives all API queries from clients and then forwards some of them to the appropriate service, which might be an upstream API server, a third-party application, or a database.

Advantages of API Gateway

Developers and end users alike may reap several benefits from using API gateways. Such gateways facilitate the management of backend services and data access for developers. Rate restriction and logging are two more useful tools for troubleshooting and improving APIs that are provided by these frameworks. If you’re an end user, an API gateway might streamline your access to data and services from numerous vendors. Additionally, it may provide supplementary privacy and security settings. As a whole, API gateways may be a helpful resource for both programmers and regular people. To name a few of their many advantages, API gateways allow for:

  • decoupling,
  • security,
  • deduced round trips,
  • rate limiting and billing, and
  • management of API keys for developers.

How Do API Gateways Perform?

A single point of control and access for developers, partners, and staff, API gateways are the backbone of any API administration strategy. But how do they function, exactly? Simply said, API gateways act as intermediaries between customers and the back-end services they need. They take care of things such as load balancing, caching, and security, among other things. API gateways are able to boost speed and scalability by taking on these roles instead of an API. They also facilitate the deployment of standard API management functions like rate throttling and authentication. An excellent place to begin improving your API is by implementing an API gateway.

When Deciding on an API Gateway, Consider These Factors

If you’re looking for an API gateway or an API management solution, here are some qualities to look for in a good one. Please be aware that the following list of characteristics is not ranked in any particular order.

Security

An API gateway is another always-on system that needs careful planning, implementation, and maintenance. An API gateway may become a weak point in a system’s defenses. You should verify its safety before committing to it. There have to be rules in place that make SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) use mandatory and in line with certain privacy laws. When interacting with the tool’s administrative setup, you should also check to see whether it supports strong authentication.

We need to log in via an API key or through other authentication methods because configuring is a mission-critical function. Most API gateway providers have enabled token-based access to Admin API, and those providers, including Apache APISIX, strongly recommend that you generate your own token and often change it.

Layout Simplicity

The configuration of an API gateway should be as simple and quick as possible. A long queue means wasted time for developers who need to set up a gateway. When the number of microservices and the functionality of their APIs grows, the routing configuration needed to connect them might get complicated. As you add or delete routes and upstream services, test how quickly an API gateway configuration is updated to avoid any disruption in service. Hot reloading of APISIX plugins, for instance, eliminates the need to restart a service by way of a dedicated HTTP interface call.

Choices for Setup and Deployment

When making changes to an API gateway, it’s also crucial to consider how difficult it is to install and redeploy the gateway. Learn about the many setup options available to you. Most modern API gateways are compatible with any environment and may be configured in a number of ways (package-based, Docker, Helm, RPM, Linux, Windows, macOS). For example, Kong’s many installation choices, including the best API for stock trading such as Docker and Vagrant, make it simple to get a deployment up and running quickly.

Cloud-hosted vs Self-hosted

Whether you decide on an on-premise, SaaS (Software as a Service), or hybrid gateway implementation is another factor to consider when selecting an API gateway. Most people merely utilize the default setting of having an API gateway built right into a SaaS product, which is the case for all API platforms. This is because customers can easily link it with the cloud provider’s other services and reap the advantages of a SaaS environment (availability assurances, automated scalability, and operational security offered).

Some well-known cloud-based API management services are as follows.

  • Amazon Web Services API Gateway
  • Gateway for Google Cloud APIs
  • Azure API Management
  • IBM API Connect

While deploying an open-source or corporate API gateway to the cloud provider where your other applications (Web or API services) are hosted offers more flexibility, doing so may make integrating with third-party services more challenging.

Customization

There are customization needs for API gateways in addition to deployment considerations. So, when an API gateway alone won’t cut it, check how much of a breeze it is to design a solution from scratch using your selected API gateway. If the technical needs of your system are not satisfied by existing plugins, you may need to develop new custom plugins to increase your gateway’s capability.

Integration

The next quality of a superior API gateway is its capacity for blending into a variety of existing systems. You should see whether it works with your current set of software, hardware, and services.

Performance

In today’s fast-paced digital world, a sluggish app may quickly cause users to abandon your product in favor of a rival’s. An application’s gateway to the outside world, an API, must be able to process and reply swiftly to requests from the outside world. However, not every API gateway is created equal in terms of functionality. If you need a real-time, lightning-fast response from your application, you should compare the API gateway provider’s performance benchmarks. The speed and scalability of an API gateway are often quite significant, even though most businesses do not operate at a scale that receives billions of requests each day. For instance, the Apache APISIX gateway allows you to build synchronized systems at fast speeds by using radix tree-route-matching.

Features

Every API gateway offers a unique set of capabilities. Some plugins/extensions are free, while others cost money or are restricted by the open-source or business edition you choose. Through your research, you may have learned that many commercial plugins and features that require money to license are available in the most popular open-source project for free.

Price

One last consideration is the price tag attached to using an API gateway. You should choose one with an open-source implementation if it is already being used by numerous businesses and is ready for full-scale production. Make sure the gateway’s corporate version has the necessary features and that the provider offers a free trial with sufficient access to test everything out before you shell out any cash. To simplify things, several open-source API gateway providers (like Tyk or API7.ai, which is built on top of Apache APISIX) provide the same API gateway to both community edition and business users with no functional differences.

API Gateway Advantages

Whether your API is for internal use only or is available to the public, there are several advantages to using API gateways.

Decoupling

Because a client is bound to underlying architecture and organization, it might be difficult to rename or relocate numerous services that clients have interacted with directly, and over which you have no influence. To separate a public-facing API integration from underlying microservice architecture, API gateways let you route, depending on path, hostname, headers, and other critical factors.

Curb the Number of Return Journeys

There may be a requirement for data joining between several services at certain API endpoints. Such consolidation may be handled by API gateways, sparing the client the trouble of complex call chaining and cutting down on unnecessary round trips.

Security

Controls like rate restriction, bot detection, authentication, and CORS may all be managed from a single location with the help of an API gateway. Setting up a data store like Redis to keep track of session data is an option offered by many API gateways.

Questions That Cut Across Disciplines

It is not necessary to deploy individual solutions to logging, caching, and other cross-cutting problems to each microservice because they may be handled by centralized appliances. In reality, you may get cutting-edge API and customer analytics without downloading any SDKs by using the plugins that Cmarix offers for a wide variety of API gateways, such as Kong and Tyk.